Roleplaying Game

Prayers for Rain

In the days since blood fell from the sky – in an event that was scandalously under-reported for the sake of tourism dollars – the tiny town of Searchlight had done its best to clean up and look respectable. The sidewalks and streets had been hosed down, the buildings power washed, the cars scrubbed. It was a monumental task but people pitched in because the blood was drying flies. It also stank to high heaven.

But the outskirts, the dirt lots, and even the cemetery remained rust-red. It was like driving through an alien terrain. Brian made the trip around sunset when there was enough light to illuminate the area but not so much that he sweltered in his car. Air conditioning wasn’t powerful enough to combat that much direct sunlight. The thick, iron-sweet scent came through his air vents. He resisted the urge to cover his nose; it wouldn’t be any better when he got out of the car.

Brian parked in a neglected lot near a motel no longer in use.

He got out and shoved his keys into his pants pocket. Blood had collected and congealed in potholes around his feet, and the scrub grass was stained too. Brian squatted and pinked some of the sand, pink as coral, between his fingers. A warm wind blew his hair into his eyes so he looked up. As the sun slipped behind the hills, it lit up the ridge like liquid fire and then it was gone.

Dark would be quick and complete. There was no such thing as dark in Las Vegas, no real night to speak of. He remembered the desert with its inky sky and stars from his teenage years in his dad’s RV, which he parked wherever was cheap. The desert made Brian feel okay. A lot less frantic.

He left his door ajar and sat on the front seat, feet sticking out while he lit up a smoke.

Flesh and jelly... Meat could be removed and there were plenty of desert predators who would gladly feast upon it. Blood, though. Blood remained. Sank into soil and dust, offering liquid refreshment.

"Time was, when the ground ran fresh with crimson, men would celebrate it."

If insect life could be heard, it often quietened at times like these. When her presence could be felt to coalesce and wander. A voice given to melodious chime and slithering half-way between the realms of telepathic and audible.

"But perhaps the days of Tiberius Gracchus still offer lessons from which we can learn."

Decked out in a courtly dress of the damned, the figure might have been taken for wearing fancy dress, were it not for her presence. For her ghostly complexion, too, pale enough for curiosity to wonder if, beneath clothing, skeletal ribs might be visible. If so, one wouldn't know it for the casual smile witnessed upon those black lips.

"To stand for one's principles can lead to considerable inconvenience."

The voice came from nowhere and yet it seemed to be both internal and external, bouncing flat off the hot, gummy asphalt and reverberating in his skull. Brian jumped. His cigarette bounced off his knee and rolled into the crack between his seat and the open door. “Shit.” He grasped at it with two fingers and recovered the cigarette before it could ignite the wiry beige upholstery. “You scared me.”

Behind a nervous laugh, he took a drag to keep his smoke lit. When he looked at her more carefully, Brian felt his dark arm hairs standing on end. It wasn’t the clothes, although they were insanely weird for the desert. He saw goths all the time at the Dive; some people called him one. It was the veins in her face and neck, and fuck, she was skinny. The ridge of her collarbone was pronounced in the neckline of her dress.

He was keyed up now, so he climbed out of his car seat. Brian glanced over the roof at the abandoned hotel and lot. Where had she come from? Not from one of those boarded up doors. “They, um… didn’t they beat that guy to death? For being a man of the people?” Distracted, he turned back to her.

Most people projected warmth when they smiled. The curve of these black lips gave more of an effortless icy chill. When next she spoke, the Corruptress' voice seemed more firmly rooted in the here and now. As did her physicality. Less... Spectral.

"Champion to the people," the visitor clarified. "And threat to vested interests... Destroyed by the very mob who gave him such distinction."

She glanced around her self now, turning. Lungs filling with air, inhaling deeply through nose. Her gaze falling, at last, back to meet his. Her head tilting slightly.

A shrugging gesture. Brian pressed at the corners of his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. His vision wasn’t right. For a second, the woman had seemed to go from blurry to crisp lines, a trick of the eye that reminded him of watching a speaker vibrate when the bass bumped into it. He wondered if it was because of the heat, either radiating from the ground or screwing with his system.

“I don’t know.” He sniffed and refocused on the woman. Where did that accent originate? He thought it was vaguely European but it didn’t sound like the British people he knew, not Holly, not Julianna. “I’d make people more honest, I guess.” The line of questioning caught him off guard. He liked thinking deeply but it wasn’t common for a stranger to be so philosophical off the bat.

Brian cocked his head as he stared at her and took another pull from the cigarette. He was torn between asking what she was doing out there – kind of hypocritical – and engaging the conversation. “I’d probably keep people from sneaking up on me, too.” He smiled. “What about you?”

Less direct sunlight, he predicted. In the waning light he could tell she was paler than him. The wind blew a piece of the cherry onto his arm and he brushed at the gray ashes.

There was a strange ethereal purr as she echoed his phrasing with a repeated, "Honesty..." Mulling it over, yes, but the verbal quality was very real. Difficult to tell if she had a vampiric growl in her throat or if it was something else nearby, like a wolf.

Elfleda keyed on potential. Didn't feed upon it, for it was a concept, but sensed it, yes. Nurtured it. Coaxed it. Sought it out and, like a cosmic gardener, looked where best to prune and help blossom. He had her attention now, that was for sure.

Perhaps had for a while.

"What a terribly pragmatic choice, yes," she readily agreed. The words tripping off her black tongue with a hopscotch-like playfulness. She may as well have been skipping. "If some were at least honest with themselves, I'm sure we could all prosper, yes?"

Fingers splayed at each side, hands opening, palms facing downwards. Just for a few moments. The figure in white and black sensing for something within the very ground she walked upon.

"You want to know my desires?" Lips and tongue might be of ebony, but her teeth were white. Mouth parting a little as she smiled anew, revealing them. Her gradual approach? More of a glide then stepping of feet. "What I would wish for this world... Oh..."

Up closer like that, the smoothness of that bone-white skin possessed a strangeness to it. Not waxy, but like she had arisen from bleached mercury. Something alien, yet not. Her face, having turned away in momentary contemplation of the query, betraying an unpleasant sneer of contempt. Her mind reaching back into old memories, sifting through the same. Old hatreds from earlier times.

“Yeah I guess.” He smiled, a little caught off his guard but trying to be friendly. Her complexion reminded him of wet white pulp, a childhood field trip to a paper mill where he’d seen a big vat of the stuff. Sick-white. Curiosity mixed with dread as she approached him, because Brian had begun to suspect she wasn’t one-hundred percent human. Who was anymore?

“My mom used to say I didn’t look the part. Bear with me.” He took a last drag from the carcinogenic crutch and flicked it across the black surface of ground. It skipped and rolled into a fissure, stark and clean amidst the neglected pavement and its ill-gotten coat of paint. “I used to get pegged for a shoplifter. She said it was my clothes. My hair. Tattoos.” He briefly rubbed a row of black letters on his arm – the dogs of doom are howling more – and then lifted his shoulders, shoe now scuffing at a bedraggled tuft of weeds. “No matter what, people would always see the way I looked first.”

He settled into a lean against his car, as much of a retreat for personal space as he could manage, and buried his fists in his pockets. One thumb flicked at his knuckles.

"Oh," she tutted, adopting a pout of faux concern, brow creasing. "People and their judgements... They really should learn to adjust such perspectives."

For being outside, the atmosphere was becoming strangely oppressive and heavy. Literature on ghostly manifestations would become more available in future years, but a change like that was regarded as indicative of spiritual negativity. Something a being like this brought with her in spades. She was, after all, what amounted to a representative. An avatar, so to speak.

And one which, even now, was slowly beginning to try and leak into his aura, attempting to turn it muddy with a more clouded point of view... A more susceptible mindset. Given sufficient time, one's moral urges could be inverted completely.

Lifting hand, several inches of air separated her fingernail from his chest, but there was the unmistakable sensation of it seeming to press against his clothing and flesh in the same upwards direction, as if somehow a shadow with volume.

"Doesn't society celebrate the capacity for change? Is it not our duty to give it the correct... Nudge?"

The smile widened.

"You've a considerable talent, Mister Campo... Why not use it? Force the issue of respect..."

“Talent, what do you mean? How do you know me?” His small faltered. He frowned.

It was hard not to knock her hand aside, but the minute you touched somebody things got confrontational and he wasn’t that kind of guy, not on a lot of levels. The air carried the charge of an electrical storm, the heaviness of humidity: a sky about to burst and rain hell on the earth, but it was clear overhead for miles.

An introvert at heart, Brian craved distance from people he didn’t know. This – she – was an extreme. When he met her eyes, he felt looked into. Pinned in place. That finger, jabbing near… stirring up a knot of anxiety and love and angst and lust and loneliness and frustration, deep in his ribs where he buried it until it forced its way out in telekinetic release. Brian half-expected her to taste her fingertip.

Force the issue of respect…

Echoing in his ears.

A trickle of sweat ran from his ear to his neck and soaked into his collar.

Only her shadow touched against skin, yet her hand seemed to close around his beating heart, with all the implied sensuality and potential danger that implied. She spelled out neither, yet represented both.

"Elfleda..."

For a moment, her voice seemed as if it was of two realms, again. The serpent to his proverbial Eve; Eden or not.

"And I could bring you many things... Take you many places... Your sense of need be only high enough. Passionate enough. Some souls..." Black eyes cast down to his chest in contemplation, then raised back up to meet his gaze. "For them, passion is a force of chaos. Others? Others can handle it so much better... Use it to help forge themselves anew. I believe you could be such a soul, hmm?"

Brian swallowed thickly. His chest hurt, like he’d run a mile at break-neck speed. The car frame was hot on his back, the pavement warm under his boots. But that shadow of her hand, that not-quite-touch, was nice and cool, an icy sensation that should have shocked him the way of bucket of water would, but instead reminded him of his mother’s cold fingers on his feverish skin.

“I’m not good at control.”

But getting better, his inner voice said. A month ago, Brian would’ve broken the glass out of the windows, ripped the antenna off the car and sent it whipping through the air. Now nothing happened except a vibration, subtle as the frame of a house trembling while a freight train rolled by. His hands remained in his pockets.

Looking into her face, Brian remembered being fourteen and pinned in a corner by a girl he had daydreamed about. Kim. Knees knocking, body reacting out of fear and excitement and tongue-thickening dread, while she leaned in smelling of fruit flavored lip gloss.

But Elfleda’s lips were black, and this wasn’t teenage flirtation. It was danger. He didn’t know what kind, but he sensed her power in the air. “What do you want?”

The air felt thin and also toxic. Brian found himself taking shallow breaths. He had gone from intrigued to alarmed to outright fucking panicked in under a minute. If he struck her, would his hands go right through her? If he pushed at Elfleda with his mind, would she budge? Somehow his hands had come out of his pockets and he lifted them to her shoulders.

He saw it in his head: one, two, three, and he’d shove with the force of his power, an accompanying, “Get off me!” that shattered the relative calm of the parking lot and bounced off the battened doors of that cheap motel. Elfleda would skid away from him. She’d shriek, hiss maybe, and then disappear in a puff of swirling, black smoke, leaving him breathless and sweat-drenched but okay. He’d have to squat down or a second to get his bearings, and then he’d grab his keys, stick them in the ignition, and get the hell out of Searchlight. He’d spend the length of the trip glancing in his rearview and checking his back seat.

But he did none of it.

When his hands clenched, they sunk into flesh as pliable as putty. She wasn’t solid, not like his physical world. Brian turned his face to avoid her mouth and eyes. She was a viper in a pretty disguise and all the muscles in him had knotted up in reaction to her.

Yet something in his mind and heart was shifting. Yielding. The more he tapped into that hidden well of telekinetic strength and prepared himself to use it, the harder it seemed to be to filter her out. As if the two were connected, her power and his power, and he still didn’t know what her power was. Brian gritted his teeth and screamed a noise of frustration.

A peculiar voice in his head whispered that he could try her on, wrap himself in that ephemeral haze like a cloak.

Such an aggressive act, yet caressed in gentle affection. Perhaps her very appearance, of whites and blacks, echoed the contradictions she seemed to represent.

Yet, the force of will he exerted seemed just enough to wash her away, like shadows not quite able to survive against an onslaught of light. Nevertheless, the figure remained. Anchored to his form.

"You could bring such thunder," she cooed with a trail of icy finger to mortal jaw. "Even now, in your resistance, you become something beautiful, Mister Campo... Something wanted. Something which deserves better."

Expression hardened.

"Do not be content to squirm in this bucket of rotting fish you find yourself... You settle for less when you could have more."

It was like being in an oven of somehow freezing heat. A viscous cloud of toxicity which sought to imprint itself, contaminate and pollute. Yet... Yet, its own held purpose. She didn't want just another victim. She was after something else.

"Promise me..." She spoke into ear with a voice of burning honey. "Promise me a vengeance of my choosing... Promise this and I will grant you freedom. What say you?"

Willpower was never Brian’s strong suit. He had fed his emotions with a steady diet of pills, blunts, and bottles for year, so willpower showed little promise of surfacing now. Not while the poison seeped into him and the promise of freedom loomed large. He was so angry. So incredibly, hellishly pissed.

He gave way.

“Fine! Just.. get the fuck off me,” he growled. This time, he did push with hands and mind.

All of a sudden, it ended. Her presence, her physical contact - everything. Where there had been the distinct impression of being stuck in a kiln's furnace, like clay, it was now like a flood of cold water had doused his surroundings. One could almost expect a gentle hiss of cooling metal, for all the relief conveyed.

"William Basterson," spoke the devil-woman in his midst. A gentle, if sudden, pressing of finger to his forehead in a communication of the man's face. Flashes of an act he had engaged in: An elderly citizen beaten to near-concussion for the sake of meagre funds to supply a drug habit. A habit now starting to turn into pushing those same narcotics onto others.

"His end nears... You have the power to decide if it should drag others down with him or not."